Capacity architecture involves the design of information technology (IT) components and capacity, e.g., assets and servers, for one or more clients. Moreover, within a shared On Demand environment, capacity architecture involves designing an IT system for, e.g., a client in a shared environment. That is, in a shared On Demand environment, a plurality of clients may share the same IT resources, e.g., components, capacity and servers.
A Delivery Architect or a capacity planning and architect team may perform capacity planning and architecture. Conventionally, a Delivery Architect communicates information in various forms from a myriad of sources (e.g., multiple databases, spreadsheets, etc.). Conventionally, in order to perform capacity architecture, the Delivery Architect would need to reference dozens of individual spreadsheets located in multiple document repositories in order to keep track of the various components that comprised the assets and servers in an On Demand Datacenter (ODCS). Some spreadsheets contain information about specific customer servers and assets, while other spreadsheets contain information for the entire datacenter. Furthermore, some spreadsheets function as ways to track allocated resources on assets, while others are used to keep track of which host names were in use or available. Additionally, another set of spreadsheets may be used as a means to visually display which servers were assigned to which asset, so that this information could be shown to a customer.
Delivery Architecture tasks require the information contained in many (if not all) of these dozens of spreadsheets to be regularly updated to maintain accuracy. Having this updated information is important to a Delivery Architect to ensure, e.g., servers delivered in the ODCS environment are compliant with established ODCS Architecture Standards. However, conventionally, it is extremely confusing and difficult to manage and time consuming to locate and update the information contained in these spreadsheets accurately, which leads to errors in allocation and design.
Additionally, a major output of the Delivery Architect function is the documenting of specific build instructions into a “Buildsheet”. The Buildsheet is a large, comprehensive spreadsheet used by System Administrators as the primary source of information that is needed to successfully build and configure assets and servers. The Buildsheet is vital and necessary in order to build servers, but it is cumbersome, complicated and requires intensive labor to maintain. Conventionally, each new version of a Buildsheet is the result of manual manipulation by either the Delivery Architect, or a NID (Network Implementation Design) Designer. However, as the Buildsheets are manually generated, they are rarely updated and/or accurate for continuous usage.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.